Trapped in purgatory

 First and foremost, if you are an avid fan of The Divine Comedy, you are going to hate what EA has done to their Dante’s Inferno game. It is as blistered and altered and transformed from the original poem as you feared. I’ve joked before about video gamizing in the past, but Dante’s Inferno really raises the bar to downright sacrilegious levels. But if you avoid taking personal offense to how Dante’s Inferno butchers the legendary work that is The Divine Comedy (and for that matter, the legendary game that is God of War) then you’ll actually find a surprising bit of unintended, not very-divine comedy.

Dante’s Inferno is as much a homage to The Divine Comedy as The Insane Clown Posse is a homage to Muddy Waters, or any music in general. In The Divine Comedy, Dante was a poet whom traversed the circles of hell, purgatory and heaven like a tourist, having friendly conversations with the locals and soaking in the sights under the hope of seeking blessing from some Beatrice angel thingy. In Dante’s Inferno, Dante is a jacked-to-the-gills Emo Crusader that laughs at death…literally. He takes the Grim Reaper’s scythe and slices him in half while the angel of death begs for mercy. He then returns home, only to find a bald-headed naked Satan taking the very naked soul of his wife Beatrice down to hell due to Dante’s (obviously) sordid past. Of course, the only way Dante knows how to make things right is to traverse the nine circles of hell and disrupt Lucifer’s operation of tormenting the damned. Taken on its own, the Dante’s Inferno plot is your typical video game plot of a crazy good guy trying to muck up everyone that the crazy bad guy works for.

And thus begins the merry romp into the underworld. When you think about it, Dante’s Inferno is all about two ideas; cloning God of War and giving concept artists a chance to unleash their darkest fantasies onto a piece of paper. Each circle of hell (well, 8 out of 9) are recreated with lovingly twisted imagery, and each populated with appropriately gory enemies. Babies with claws, prostitutes with AIDS-powered tentacles, fat dudes with mouths for hands… the concept artists for Dante’s Inferno had a real field day creating monsters for their vision of the beyond. Sure, it gets a bit silly to see certain enemies overlap in circles they don’t belong in; the Lust hooker monsters are probably a bit out of place in the swampish Anger circle, but whatever. You do kill Minos, the secretary of Hell, very early on in the game, so it is a bit understandable that the paperwork of hell is a bit mixed up as Dante progresses.

As for the former part, Dante’s Inferno recreates God of War with about as much mercy and understanding as Kratos recreates the pain and suffering on all of those who cross his path. You run and double jump like Kratos. You roll out of harm’s way like Kratos. You swing and shimmy across ropes like Kratos. You quick time event death-defying events like Kratos. You fail quick time events and start the cutscene over again like Kratos. You inject steroids into your buttcheeks like Kratos. I could only think of one original gameplay mechanic in the entire game, and it’s so unholy and yet so comedic that I’ll get to it in a bit. Back to Kratoizing.

The combat is very much GOWian. A bunch of enemies of various kinds swarm

in, often in large, repeating waves, using light and heavy attacks from both your scythe and holy cross. There’s something ironically funny about attacking enemies with cross projectiles. I can’t explain why, but for some reason, I never grew sick and tired of the combat. Sure, I knew I was merely fighting the same ten to twelve different enemies en masse. Sure, it reeks of artificial game lengthening when you flip a switch to open a door, only for the door to shut back tight and a swarm of enemies to appear and mock your wasted energy before the switch can be flipped again. Sure, some of those waves of enemies just seem to go on and on like that song that never ends. But to my surprise, I never loathed the action. Maybe it’s the visceral satisfaction of dicing multiple enemies with your mighty cross. Maybe it’s the gradually unlocking of abilities that let you air combo and juggle an entire entourage of demons in the air simultaneously. But this is a game that is very much carried by the strengths of its combat system, and the ability to slay many, many, many of Satan’s homeboys by the dozen.

Speaking of which, that upgrade system is driven by a Holy and Unholy morality system. Though calling it a morality system seems dishonest; a morality system is what Bioware games have, or Infamous, or other games with branching story paths based on a pretense of your character being “good” or “bad”. In this game, you’re always good; there’s but one single linear story, and one single linear ending. Rather, you earn Holy or Unholy points based on whether you choose to Punish (i.e. slaughter) certain enemies or Absolve (i.e. slaughter with religion) them. Likewise, you will run into famous celebrities (well apparently famous for their time. I only recognized Pontius Pilate) and can choose to either send them to heaven or damn them for points. (And damn them to what, I wonder. More hell?) The salvation option is comedic in the sense that you are made to play a Simon-esque mini game where you have to time button presses to catch little orbs called “sins.” Ultimately, all of the cool Holy and Unholy attacks are early-level material, so you’ll probably have a variety of Holy and Unholy points, and the morality system feels like a wasted opportunity. Dante runs into many key figures into his life and I would’ve loved to be given the chance to punish or absolve them, with potential storyline repercussions. Same with bosses too; I would love to absolve Cerberus, see what the Lord thinks of that.

So despite the sheer combat overdose, despite the unabashed ways it rips off God of War, despite the missed opportunities, I really only have one true legitimate complaint with Dante’s Inferno. The second-to-last level, the circle of Fraud, which I think is a big deal in the Divine Comedy. (I think it’s a circle of hell that has its own 10 circles dedicated to it. Hell architects had strange priorities. Though it is funny that politicians get their own circle. Stephen Harper, your fate is sealed.) This level is transformed into ten arena challenges, where Dante stands on the exact same platform and smacks up respawning enemies, and always with a stupid stipulation attached. What do I prove to the Lord above by completing a 100-hit combo, or staying in the air for 8 seconds? Both challenges required either a deceptive manipulation of my equipped items or exploiting certain moves to cheat to advance. Both of which resorted in my Gamefaq-ing the solutions to the problem. This was the part of the game where I felt like I was indeed being damned and punished by Visceral Games for my previously hating Dead Space. Or maybe this was the part of the game where the budget ran dry, or the release date drawn dangerously close, and the developers were in a panic to finish their game and satisfy the dark overlords at EA.

In any event, the biggest surprise about Dante’s Inferno was just how little I hated the game. It’s not terrific, it’s far from perfect, but it’s easier to enjoy if you know what you’re getting yourself into. I can neither absolve nor damn the game, but rather send it to rental purgatory. It’s about 7 hours long, and I am already in the midst of a second playthrough, and that’s more than I can say for, oh I don’t know, God of War 2. X-Men Origins: Wolverine is still the king of the God of War clones, and the actual next God of War is only a few weeks away from release as of this writing. But if the notion of slicing a giant purple Cleopatra’s cleavage off appeals to you, this is about the best and only socially acceptable way to go about it.

3 ½ stars